Posts Tagged ‘The View from Baghdad’

Companies prequalified to bid for one of 12 blocks in Iraq’s upcoming fourth licensing round have since last week been poring over the adjusted terms introduced by Iraq’s oil ministry to the second version of the draft “exploration, development and production service contract” or EDPSC. The new terms offer incentives to companies based on comments and observations they provided to the petroleum contracting and licensing department. It took longer than expected to review 600 pages of comments received on the first version, to integrate new concepts in the draft and …

Iraq’s newly announced proven oil reserves figure of 143.1 billion barrels is most likely closer to the reality than the old one of 115 billion bbls minus what has been produced since the last revision, which is put at 5 billion bbls. But the question is how did Iraq arrive at this magic number without new exploration or new discoveries and while 3-D seismic surveys for the southern oil fields is still ongoing and can’t yet give a comprehensive picture of the state of Iraq’s reserves.